When Windows Phone 7 came out, they went ALL out on it, buying Nokia, pushing phones, top ads for a long time (first year or so), I mean every football game there was at LEAST 3-4 ads for Windows Phone. They PAID off the top 10 devs to create apps and after many billions of dollars, they didn't get a major return. After all this major push, it maxed out around 4-4.5% of the GLOBAL marketshare. No promotion for retailers so, it was never pushed (this is where MS should did a lot of focus).
The question is, will the Surface Phone relaunch of sorts get 4-5% again? It's going to flop, that I can be quite confident in predicting.
MS was never going to come out late and launch a phone OS and get immediate significant adoption of it, the problem I have is that they've had two false starts now and the realisty behind that is, the race around them has just continued while
they were late to start, and then rushed back to the start line
two times, and I think that's just showing why they've struggled to get any momentum. The app gap was a bigger problem back then, because there were heaps of apps which just weren't there. There was promise, though, whereas now, it's just obvious that the platform is in decline. Couple that with the strong contagion of a declining platform in the media, MS can't ignore that. Their advertising and marketing needs to address all of that.
In hindsight, WP8, while the OS was good, it was a completely wasted effort. Why did they burn up all that good will and annoy so many customers by abandoning WP7, only to give up on WP8 three years later? Why spurn so many developers too? Why waste the momentum from WP7 by flicking the reset switch? I know they were going to change names, but what I'm referring to here is how with each major iteration, there essentially is no forward compatibility. Have apple or google done that where a change to the OS makes new apps no longer compatible with older versions?
It could be made of 18K solid gold and with EVERY feature known to man that could be possable, It's still not going to change much. Microsoft is clearly not interested in promoting it and spending the money to grow marketshare. It could be the PERFECT phone, the fans will buy it but, cant see many iOS or Android users coming over. Just because the phone is perfect, it needs the support path to be PERFECT and Microsoft does not want to invest it.
Riddle me this, ...
The dream is over...it really is..
My point was that it's a big ask, that nothing short of perfection will solve the problem, and even then, they need a large component of luck. So the reality is, like you said, it is over, and I agree with your sentiment. I don't think UWP is the solution, clearly we don't have a situation where developers are falling over themselves to release those apps, and while a surface phone that runs x86 apps would bring something very different to the table, I still don't know whether it could do it.
I entered smartphones with an android phone. I got a SGS1 and it was a heap of junk. Incredibly buggy, and completely lacked support to fix it. I'm generally not an apple person, so I went with WP as an alternative. I liked what I saw, and I got a L920 at launch, which I'm still using. I like the OS, I like the UI, initially it was missing a lot of desperately needed features, but WP8.1 fixed most of that. To answer your question, I didn't really give WP a look in when I first entered, so I seriously doubt I would now.
I want the platform to succeed, but like you've pointed out, there's absolutely no coherent message of support for it to succeed, and by the time next year rolls around, that's a lot of wasted time. If my phone dies and I have to get a replacement, in the foreseeable future, I'm out, unless I can get a W10M phone really cheap, I'll probably go to android.
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